Serious problem with employee routing

[Daknife]

They work at the airport, how can they not make their way 10 squares from the subway to the security gate that needs to be operated? Or to the baggage platform that needs staffing.

Or to any of their jobs. Staffing should be a matter of managing staffing numbers versus needed positions divided by number of shifts a day versus overall cost as part of the budget.

I’m not wasting time trying to grab screen shots, but I have 37 security positions to fill. I had hired nearly 300 security agents to staff my security gates and baggage screening stations. Yet I could get no more than four security gates at my three terminals and about half my tier three scanners staffed. By the same agents who never left their positions while hundreds of other security agents just stood around, often just feet from a station needing to be staffed.

Then I tried firing them all and hiring anew and now none of the security positions are filled. And I’m about to kill this airport and try one more time, as it currently has everybody trapped outside of security except those leaving the airport after arriving on flights.

If I hire a person, once they are in the airport, they should be able to make their way to a duty position. If I don’t have enough then those positions will be unfilled and the jobs not performed or passengers not moved as efficiently.

This game is fun, it has great potential, but getting employees to do the job you hire them for should not be the battle. When hired I should be able to assign them to duty positions or shifts, or areas to patrol or roam, failure to do so could lead to unbalanced shifts with everybody wanting to work days and nobody wanting the graveyard leaving me with too few workers. Or failure to set work zones could lead to all my janitors and technicians working in one area while the rest of the airport goes to crap.

Before you go adding more features, make the employees function more accurately. lower trained employees are slower and make more mistakes, maybe they do take a bit of time to find their way to and from their duty position each shift. Better trained employees are more efficient, they can scan more bags, toss more bags, fix quicker (cheaper) and clean better (more time between cleaning sessions). But they should report for duty, after a few shifts on the job they should be able to show up to their position on time for their shift.

Having hundreds of extra employees and still not getting all the regular ongoing jobs filled is a joke and not realistic at all. If I have 30 security positions and stick with 6 hour shifts I need 120 positions and maybe even one more for every 10 as a manager.

[OKChris]

I had the issue of security guards not manning checkpoints too, but it is quite rare for me. Save and reload usually fixes it.

Are you on the default or experimental branch? Also, did you get any notifications/alerts?

[craigwats]

Can totally understand your frustration but be mindful this is an early release and the development team are incredibly responsive and dedicated, much more so than other game releases. Your post is a bit strong and abrupt…

I know the team and other players will happily look at this and assist but a bit respect

[Olof]

Can you bug report this save for me and drop the issue number here?

[LPB]

From my experience the employee behavior has increased a lot since earlier versions of this game. I am playing on the default branch.
The main issue is often, that staff does not reach their job sides quick enough, because bath- and staffrooms are to far away or not available at different positions at the airport.

Another matter is, that for me it looks like that the game searches for the closest available staff members, which often leads to the problem, that the same members, which are exhausted already, claim the job tasks instead of available, rested staff. Until A35 that wasn´t a big deal, but once staff happiness effects the game, I can imagine that this behavior becomes problematically.

Furthermore I experience, that staff members do not spread evenly along staff rooms, althoug they are pretty close together. So I have many employees standing around and not beeing able to rest, although a nearby staff romm with seating options is available.

I hope there will be a few adjustments and optimizations during the Beta.

Looking forward to the A36 default

[Puma]

Welcome to the forum! And thanks for sharing your issue as that can and will help to improve the game. As @craigwats states the devs are very dedicated, as you have seen Olof already replied, and they are always willing to help, like we all are here at the forum. I had similar issues and the problem was the assignment of personnel to a terminal, where the personnel standing around were assigned to another terminal (not opened yet but already drawn) or not assigned to any terminal. So you could check in the terminal overview if there is available staff or if personnel is assigned to other terminals. You can also check this in the employee card to which terminal they are assigned. But as Olof says, please file the issue through the in-game bug reporter and please share the bug number in this thread so the devs can have a look at it.

[Bardaek]

Long Post, but probably worth your time to read if you’re new.

Welcome to the game,

You’ve joined the game at a very amazing time. The development team of a few has been at this design for more than 3 years, though 36 full alpha version updates for a game still in the Alpha Phase. I’ve managed to give these complete strangers on a different continent 705 hours of play time over a period of very likely right after early release in Sept 2017.

You really have no idea how far this game has come. Even with 705 hours, I still spend time experimenting and trying to figure it out. The amazing part of that is that you can learn, and it might be helpful. The Dev Blog is readily available: all 156 of them in 3 years. That’s a huge time investment in relationship building with the community.

The recent Emergency Update has put me in a position to rethink my entire airport design flow because of something so silly, but laughingly real… a fox… was wandering down my taxiway, right along the side giving the plane behind it the middle finger as it meandered on… the jet was finally able to park. This isn’t a game flaw, this is a lack of fencing on my part flaw. Never used fencing in the past. Have to now… and it needs to be everywhere, appropriately.

The Research Update changed everything as much. Never bothered with having to figure out where to locate and office/admin building… and then of course… giving the staff desks and places to work…and restrooms, and restaurants in the admin building as the admin building isn’t in the terminal, and now with people needing to eat and pee… nevermind the research itself, which was brilliant in execution. I wish you could have seen the system as it was before that update.

The Bib Bird update is a beast I still have not been able to fully implement in a start from scratch airport, because I"m still learning.

The Terminal Update again… changed my entire approach to airport design. International Zones… what the… with new requirements of security and staff… And what do these automated check in things do?

When they release an update with new game features, those features are usually a direct result of input by a very engaged community. The people movers alone that were recently released can be found on the feature voting thread. I wish I could get my damn underground fuel lines, but I digress.

@Olof The Lead Developer responded to your post himself noting to please post a bug report and post the number there. Over the last year, they have found that the number of bug reports being submitted is moving more and more toward errors of the airport designer rather than errors of the game technology. I find that just about every screwed up flow issue I have found is because I’m still learning what it is supposed to look like. I really suspect this was done as a courtesy to you, their customer knowing exactly what he’s going to find. It’s the same suspicion those who are commenting have.

A couple things… the sandbox is a very dangerous place to play for a newbie because there is too much background understanding required of a game engine that is downright crazy complex. 37 security positions by itself sends up some red flags. If you’re not using terminals, why do you need 37 from the very beginning. If you do have terminals, there is a feature where it says “autoassign on hire” that may need to be looked at. You may need to look at the number of staff in each terminal. Break rooms are a thing. Do you have them? Have you made break rooms for different pertinent staff types near their work environment? 37 security stations tells me you probably dumped at least that many gates down… tip of the hat for that, but that’s a lot so early. And given that you haven’t said a single word about baggage handling…you’re in for a lot more headache in the sand box. Each system takes time to learn individually.

Hiring people does not mean they’ll show up to their duty position without finding a break room waiting for assignment. There’s a dispatch system in place. Learning it isn’t easy.

You should take the time to post screen shots. They’re really helpful, and really easy. They allow a community, with a LOT of time in this game to look at your design for you and offer insights. It almost always results in growth and solved.

My advice would be to work through the tutorial a couple times. Build a sandbox game with all the features in place to see what works and doesn’t work. Then save out and slide over to the live game and try it out. But do keep in mind… Alpha testing. Then Beta Testing. Then live game for public release. This is still Alpha. It’s literally a game in development.

I hope this helps